Berny Gracia, right, and Naomi Santana share a swing during a preview of Ann Hamilton’s multimedia art installation “the event of a thread,” on Tuesday, Dec. 4, 2012 at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. The participatory installation featuring 42 swings suspended from the Armory’s elliptical ceiling and tethered to a massive white cloth, is Hamilton’s first large scale project in the city in more than ten years and opens Dec. 5 for a month. “It feels great, like I am flying somewhere lost in the sky in the middle of Manhattan,” said Gracia.

It’s not overnight that art went from something you see to something you do.

The great surrealist Marcel Duchamp made pieces that required participation from viewers. So did Andy Warhol. Those were rare events in a world where simply beholding an object had been the norm for thousands of years.

These days, things are increasingly about making audiences part of the action. You can hardly enter a gallery without some demand that you make the art work yourself, by stepping or scribbling on it, by dancing or singing with it, turning its crank, eating it or tapping a keyboard.

By December 2012, interactivity was stealing the art-world buzz coast to coast, with high-profile efforts offering viewers and doers all the visceral thrills of something you might buy in an adult novelty store. In New York, you could swing on it at Ann Hamilton’s “the event of a thread.” In Colorado Springs, you bent over for it at Eiko & Koma’s “Residue of Nakedness.”

At least in Louisville, Ky., you could spend the night with it after getting your kicks. You just had to register as a guest at 21c, a concept that combines a museum and a luxury hotel.

There’s no insult in comparing art to a sex toy. I would recommend seeing the work at all three of those places enthusiastically. But it does get at the raw truth of this recent urge to participate: It’s more about your body than your brain, about putting you at the center of the universal truths art strives to deliver.

And while ideas are not dumbed down — just the opposite, sometimes the concepts are rich — the pieces can easily turn stupid. When audiences become a variable, the quality of art varies a great deal.

If minds are open, energy high, distractions minimal enough that viewers have the wherewithal to do their part, art has a chance.

When folks are uninterested, yelling at their kids, texting their boss, wearing uncomfortable shoes or fighting for a turn on the apparatus, things go south quickly.

Distractions, of course, can hinder appreciation of art anytime. No one can love a painting if the lighting is bad or the gallery too crowded. But the lack of audience satisfaction doesn’t diminish that object’s worth. “Mona Lisa” would still be a masterpiece if seen only by Leonardo.

Participatory art, on the other hand, doesn’t exist without the consumer. Unless the viewer acts well to complete it, it is unfinished, worthless. Frankly, most viewers have neither the talent nor attention span to do what’s required of them.

At “the event of a thread,” the massive show at the Park Avenue Armory, the results were mixed. Participation was fervent. People swung as high they could on the 42 wide wooden swings whose chains were connected to a giant silk curtain hanging from the ceiling. The ropes pushed and pulled and the curtain undulated wildly into a mesmerizing centerpiece the size of a football field.

But between all the wheeing and wowing, it was not clear how many people actually contemplated the piece’s intentions. “Thread” wasn’t really a replica of a playground, it was a meditation on connection and communion. But for the 4-year-olds running around and the tourists dropping popcorn on the floor, the thrill was in the tummy, not the head.

No doubt, that was not the case at the Henri Matisse retrospective 16 blocks up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. With no swings around, patrons were left to simply contemplate’s Matisse’s take on the visual world. Just you and Matisse. Ho-hum.

Participatory art comes in all formats and sizes. Works can be complex, like Rubin’s “Conflict Kitchen,” an actual restaurant in Pittsburgh that serves food from countries the U.S. is at odds with. Or they can be as simple as New Orleans artist Candy Chang’s “Before I Die,” an oversized chalk board that acts as a communal bucket list. The piece was just moved to Denver’s Civic Center.

All of it connects well to the greater DIY art culture we now live in. Technology enables us to do our own creating, from making greeting cards to learning guitar to remixing the Beatles’ “White Album.” People expect to be part of the process now.

But the big brother of the arts administration field has also been an advocate. A slew of research reports have motivated presenters to put on a more user-friendly face, chief among them a 2008 survey by the National Endowment for the Arts that reported a scary decline in attendance.

Other key reports during that decade (and reports are highly influential in the profession) laid out a framework for transitioning presenters into serving as “enablers of arts experience rather than as expert providers or arbiters of artistic taste,” as one NEA study put it. Follow-up research gave value to audience “control” over art.

The results were mixed. There were moments of good choreography, but also some dreadful “Sound of Music” sing-alongs.

For the visual arts, letting audiences in on the action has been more of a challenge. Curators were not about to give up control of the walls, and you can’t exactly hang any local watercolorist next to Frederic Remington and have people take it seriously.

The general plan of attack has been to build Internet communities around the regular works on display so people can interact, or to add hands-on opportunities to major events. The Denver Art Museum, for example, has experimented with its “studio” at the end of major shows. After touring the current “Becoming van Gogh” visitors can sit at a craft table, paint their own vase of flowers and hang it on the wall. By and large, their paintings are not very good, though maybe the act does make them feel closer to the artist, or just give them a chance to show off.

Last summer, during DAM’s celebration of design, it turned a few rooms over to locals for a show of home-made objects intended to make their neighborhoods better. There was a real energy to the exhibit, lots of diversity, and it looked exciting. But, truth be told, it was the sort of work that ought to be stuck on the family refrigerator with magnets. It wasn’t the “art” you pay to see at a high-level museum.

Moments of idiocy, too

The concurrent rise of conceptual art — art based on ideas rather than objects — has offered a better route to participation. Museums have gladly turned over huge chunks of space to it while art schools have adopted it as religion, guaranteeing its hold on the field for a generation.

There have been interactive hits. “the event of a thread” packs them in at $12 a ticket. But there have also been a lot of forsaken concepts; people aren’t all that interested most of the time.

The best successes have to come at the very high or very low end of participation. The innovative 21c, where the hotel lobby, halls and elevators show the best of 21st century art, is 100 percent immersive and irresistible because of it. Are you in a hotel or a museum? Staying the night, you become part of both (part being the primary syllable in the word “participation”).

“Residue of Nakedness,” at Colorado College, only required viewers to lean over wooden boxes to see videos of acclaimed dancers Eiko & Koma moving, unclothed, in natural settings. But the simple act pulled you in like a whirlpool. Eiko & Koma dance in slow motion; their work takes patience. Bending over, you were invested just enough to stick around for five minutes.

The fewer the demands, the more likely people will actually react. But simplicity is a double-edged sword. It invites in the idiots.

At Chang’s outdoor chalkboard, where people finish the phrase “Before I die I want to _____”, responses can make or break the moment. There’s insight to be gleaned from an answer like “adopt,” or “become a shaman,” but just more showing off in “go skydiving” or “see my children’s weddings.” Who cares?

At best, you can say those moments render the full picture of humanity: We can be brilliant, or we can be jerks. But we don’t need art that tells us the things we already know. The piece is interesting, risky in its way, and part of a life of ground-breaking work from a talented artist.

At the same time, it shows where the whole movement can break down.

The visual arts do need to engage the masses, and not just intellectuals. Swings, pigeons and chalkboards draw in a way a minimalist painting by Barnett Newman or Clyfford Still can’t.

But circus tricks let people off the hook from the real work that art fairly demands — and they provide cover for art that’s really not interesting in the first place.

The art world doesn’t have to go to the extremes of cinema to force our attention — darkening the room, insisting on total silence — but it might do well to remember that looking is participating, when it’s accompanied by an effort to comprehend, when looking is the main event, not the opening act. It’s a more demanding sort of fun.

There is no meaning in an instant still life tossed off by an amateur, just a temporary, visceral thrill. There is much meaning in all the turbulent colors and twisted shapes van Gogh put on a canvas. Just look at it. Just … look.

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